Offering Although he was known to all as the homeless indigent vagrant (“HIV”), I’d come to thinking of him as the homeless itinerant vagabond (HIV), which I then shortened to “Hive.” Little did I suspect how much of a wanderer Hive really was until recently. Sometime after his body was found, he came to me in a dream. Actually, he said, although I seemed to die I didn’t really. He grinned as he picked up Hive as my nickname for him, since in a dream one converses mind to mind. You got it pretty right, he said, but really it’s High Five (HI V [V, the roman numeral five]). I was slightly reeling from the shock of dislocation, when everything is not as it had seemed to be. I am thinking, he continued, that I’ll need some new freshly deceased body to go into, since upon my return I found my old body gone. It was in fact disposed of (per my previous piece), I chimed in. As I weakly began to inquire he flashed me a picture (which I was able to locate and have reproduced on right, just below).  Listen, he said. There is always much to hear. Before departing, I had gone to so-and-so’s (a neighbor, who I hadn’t known knew him) and written something. Find that as my true remains and offering to all. And with that he was gone. Rising up I proceeded to so-and-so’s. I tarried and dilly-dallied and by the time I got there it was almost sunset. Going up in the attic, there, still stuck in the neighbor’s old manual typewriter was the manuscript page of HI V with golden sunlight shining on it. Also on the typewriter roller, adjacent to the manuscript, was a ripped-around picture, from an old museum catalog or magazine, of a bodhisattva. I had learned, in an Oriental art course, that the names of the two hand gestures (called mudras) of the image were “Giving” (hand down) and “Fear Not” (hand up), respectively matching the words of the document. The teacher had further said that all of these images are [to be seen to be] like a mirror. So there you have it. From beyond the grave, this then is the offering made by HI V.
-- Norman Guberman |
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